GGG: Is the Orb of Alchemy vendor recipe working as intended?

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Chris wrote:

This is a system that people tell us they really enjoy. They like stashing the items and reaping the rewards when they randomly match.

I was initially worried that it'd feel like a "pay to win" system (because obviously paying for more stash tabs allows you to match more items), but we've seen users match items across multiple accounts with great success. Accounts are free (once we enter Open Beta at least!) and have four tabs by default, which is a lot of storage.

Personally I don't enjoy it at all. It is way to hard to match item names without chrome. This should not be so. There should not be a recipe that needs outside programs in such a way to be usable.

Chaos Orb is an example of a recipe that lets you stash stuff, collect them, match them and get a reward for it.

Please change Alchemy Orb recipe into something like you need 2 rare weapons of same base type or anything that need you to match graphics of items and not their text.

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Wisler444 wrote:

1) This reipce list will flood the market with alchs and chaos, making them worthless, fuse and jewel probably will stay about the same. Alterartion etc will be near worthless as will regal.

With the current implementation of the Map system, there is no way Alteration Orbs will become worthless.
More likely they will be even more expensive.

People hoarding rares for the Alch recipe wont sell the crap rares to the vendor for the alteration shards. And that goes up even more the more tabs the person can use.

I have currently 18 tabs in my stash and used to used about the half of them for rare matching. But with the map system not anymore, since i really feel the big lack of alterations if i always store my crap rares instead of selling them for shards.

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Aezurr wrote:

I like how GGG was basically asking if players felt that having more stash tabs was pay to win.

They did more than that. They suggested most players "enjoy it", which(while I understand players enjoy the rewards, as I do) I don't think is true when speaking of the whole recipe.

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Aezurr wrote:

Nobody even cares about that, it seems. They're just crying about the vendor recipes as a whole. Again, no one is forcing you to do it. If you want to mindlessly grind your way through the whole game, more power to you. Why should we make the game less player friendly (by removing the recipes) just to appease a few "hardcore" players?

Again, we don't need a gun to our head to see that putting full time and full effort into this recipe is a necessity to keep pace with the rest of the community; there is no need for gun to head tactics. You either do it or you feel you're being cheated.

Secondly, there's no need to remove the recipe entirely, if we need a rare disposal mechanism. I've suggested many times that it could simply be condensed(with roughly the same rate of gain) so that x rares : x shards of alch. This would undoubtibly make the recipe more user friendly and less of a grind fest, if that is one of your main concerns. This would be a quality of life change.

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Aezurr wrote:

That seems like what this is coming down to. "Oh no, they're making the game too easy for me! My blood is so black because I'm just so hardcore and can sit in front of my computer grinding for 8 hours a day that I just can't enjoy it anymore with this in it."

No, not really. It's more like players are incentivized to do something that is tedious and painstaking, and they dislike painstaking and tedious. No other recipe in the game takes this amount of effort, time, space and outside resources. It's clearly "broken".

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Aezurr wrote:

The fact is, alchemy orbs for the most part make shitty rares. You won't see any perfect rares or end game rares by using simple alchemy orbs. The recipe isn't hurting the game, and you're not losing anything by not using the recipe to amass alchemy orbs because they're not that useful.

This is more an opinion than anything. Opinions are relative. It's quite clear that when alch orbs are one of the main currencies that they do have value and those getting them at a faster rate than others do have an advantage(not speaking of p2w, simply a currency advantage), so it's quite obvious that if you don't do this you are missing out.

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Aezurr wrote:

And for anyone saying it takes 5 minutes to match rares, where you have to grind for 2-4 hours to get the same result.. What about the time it takes to grind the rares in the first place and get two of them to match? It's not like every single rare that drops matches names with another rare that you had gotten 5 minutes before hand. Not to mention that while farming for these orbs, you'll probably find other more valuable orbs that the vendor recipes don't offer.

Really? You obtain random rares no matter what you do in this game, you don't have to "put in time to farm rares". You simply play the game and rares fly at you. The context of the conversation you're referring to is that two players are being compared: one that hoards and one that does not. Both players run into rares, one ctrl-clicks it to their tab, the other ctrl-clicks it to the vendor. The hoarder will eventually get an alch orb, and then many more as his sample size grows. The other player will get a constant stream of alt shards, which he will eventually make into an alt orb which he will eventually make into one jeweler's orb which he will eventually make into a chromatic or fusing orb.

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Aezurr wrote:

The time it takes for you to go out and farm the orbs with a bit of quantity on your gear will probably amount to nearly the same time as the time it takes me to farm the matching rares with rarity on mine.

See above.

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Aezurr wrote:

And for the guy above me, making another account to "mule" your rares is very little effort. Think of it as getting up to go to the bathroom. You could go out and buy a bedpan and never have to leave your computer if you choose to.

Until you have to empty said bedpan, right?

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Aezurr wrote:

As for the chrome extension, chris mentioned on stream that it wouldn't be very hard to make it pool multiple accounts once the game comes out if players feel the need to match across multiple accounts.

Feel? I think it's pretty clear that the chrome app is a necessity to do this in anything but small scale. Chrome app comparing across multiple acounts is an absolute must unless we go through even further efforts to ensure like-named items are only held on one account together(meaning chest armor+sheilds, axes+swords, gloves alone, rings alone, etc.). Waiting until open beta to see if this is needed is folly.

I know I said I want posting here anymore, but really I just don't want too argue anymore. I'm thinking of selling my stash for buying up to jewelers/fusings and keeping spare alterations. Right now I almost never have these things unless I pick them up. In my 40's i'm already finding alchemy orbs a bit useless. I could burn up 8 rares to make 4 alch, then use those alch to make 2 rings, a belt and an amulet, then add 5 more rares to make a single chaos out of those 13 rares, but i'm starting to think id rather just sell to vendor up to jeweler/fusing. It would probably be more worth it in the end, unless I could trade every rare I have for an alch. I'll probably try that first.

Rares fly at you while playing the game, but so do orbs?

And I think at the moment I'd rather have the alteration orbs so I can make better maps. Every map I alch is "Players have blood magic. Players cannot regenerate health or mana"


The truth of the matter is, if no one shared these recipes, no one would be crying right now. They'd still be hidden and no one would know about them except the handful of people that discovered them.

When I first started playing, the first 3 characters I leveled to 60+ I did while having no idea any of the vendor recipes existed. Did it take away from my enjoyment of the game? No. Did I feel like I was at a disadvantage to other players? No. Why should it be any different now that we know they exist?

Maybe we should complain about people that have no school or jobs, as well. They clearly have more play time than us and have an advantage over us working folk. Maybe we need GGG to post a limit to the amount of time people can play, huh?


And while we're at it, people with more quantity get more maps. This is hardly fair. I have to grind for hours to see a map. We should probably put a cap so that users can only do one map a day, too, because getting quantity on my gear is tedious and I don't want to do it.


I'm not going to bother arguing in this thread anymore. I really do feel that this is a very minor thing and if users don't enjoy it they don't have to do it. I really hope GGG sticks to their guns and continues to develop the game the way they want to instead of the way people try to force them to. It's working great so far.

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Aezurr wrote:

Maybe we should complain about people that have no school or jobs, as well. They clearly have more play time than us and have an advantage over us working folk. Maybe we need GGG to post a limit to the amount of time people can play, huh?


And while we're at it, people with more quantity get more maps. This is hardly fair. I have to grind for hours to see a map. We should probably put a cap so that users can only do one map a day, too, because getting quantity on my gear is tedious and I don't want to do it.


I'm not going to bother arguing in this thread anymore. I really do feel that this is a very minor thing and if users don't enjoy it they don't have to do it. I really hope GGG sticks to their guns and continues to develop the game the way they want to instead of the way people try to force them to. It's working great so far.

Why over exaggerate? There is always going to be people, even those who work or go to school who will endlessly grind this game and use perks like these recipes to extreme lengths. The real potential problem is inflation of the economy, it is almost inevitable prices will rise for the top end/godly items and this is potentially a major problem, it means those pumping out recipes are the ones making the buys while those with more limited time and resources will never be able to.

I would just like to see GGG admit they see potential problems with the way the current system is and that they will keep an eye on it and not just pretend like it is fine; seems contrary to the impression I got coming into the game about the devs views of a knit tight system, it just has great potential to become very loose.

Hate to say it also but its like the D3 AH system in some respect, rather than spending time in the actual game farming to progress, being on the same playing field as everyone else your spending time in your stash or on mule accounts to create more and more currency. It also ends up dumbing down the experience of loot drops and the value of these orbs, whether literally or from the experience of the drops.

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ZeroHate wrote:

I would just like to see GGG admit they see potential problems with the way the current system is and that they will keep an eye on it and not just pretend like it is fine; seems contrary to the impression I got coming into the game about the devs views of a knit tight system, it just has great potential to become very loose.

Dude, there can't be inflation with this system.

They are consumable currencies, unlike gold. Gold, and the value of it, remains in economy forever, even with "gold sinks". There will always be more gold pouring into the system than gold dissapearing. So inflation occurs.

In this system, currencies are "chances of something good happening". And you need tons of chance before something good happens. After people have some reserves of currencies, they use use use them as they come... no inflation.

The only problem is rarety of orbs that should be more common, creating false value of currency. Namely, Alchemy and Chaos Orbs.

This is why I vote for the creationg of alchemy shards when recycling an un-indentified rare and the creation of a chaos shard (yes) when selling an identified rare. Maybe even make it work the same as alteration shards, but for rares yeilding chaos shards.

Just because they are consumables it does not mean inflation will not occur, as I said it will create a divide when it comes to bidding for and buying items, whether it is gold or orbs it is still a currency used to purchase gear; their secondary use here is irrelevant. Do not use the excuse neither that people do not have to be apart of the economy, there are many people who might enjoy trading and the economy as much as playing the game but will get left behind because they are not endlessly using recipes.

The other reality of it is how long before orbs are available on a currency website? The current recipe system as it stands might also make that a whole lot more prevalent although I have no idea what GGG might have in place to prevent that.

I strongly dislike the 3-name/2-name recipe as well. I stopped playing PoE a while ago and this was one of the reasons why. Unfortunately, I found that I spent almost as much time managing my inventory as I did playing the game, and that was a very negative aspect for me. I agree with one recurring notion in this thread: modify recipes to minimize the hoarding of rares (or any items).

It is simply this.

Players who have spent money on extra stash tabs and choose to hoard for this recipe will ALWAYS generate alchemy/chaos orbs at a faster rate than a player who uses the recipe but has not payed for stash tabs.

This, I do not like.

+1 for changing the recipe to something that both parties can equally benefit from. I'm fine with more stash tabs for convenience and storing bulk gear, but a monetary investment shouldn't translate this directly into orbs. Especially when orbs are the fundamental currency of this game.

Pay2win is a slippery slope and I think those of you defending the recipe might be worried that you are going to lose your advantage over non paying players.

edit: I'll just add that I found no enjoyment at all trying to match two rare names. I tried for about a day, and haven't ever since. There is nothing 'fun' about it in my opinion.